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I don't know that I hate them, but I do think that after 4 years of play, the lack of hit points in WEG D6 is starting to ruin the game for me as a GM. It's just so impossible to provide balanced encounters. The difference between mooks that will go down without trouble and an utterly lethal...

I don't have a lot of tolerance for illusionism either. For one thing, I don't like it as a player and I always strive hard to be the GM I would want to have as a player. But take a figure like Seth Skorkowsky whose work I admire and in whose discussions about prep I see someone who has very...

I'm inclined to say that if your players think you are running a fun game and they want to play more, then you are doing something right. I have found that the biggest braggarts about how different they are than everyone else tend to vastly overestimate how novel their techniques are or how...

Hmmm... really interesting question. I'm inclined to say "Yes." but that answer may be subtly different from what you think is implied by "coercive". For example, we'd normally think that if someone gave verbal consent or agreement that they weren't being coerced, as the normal implication of...

For a certain definition of "medium", yes. Without some objective measurement scale I can't put an objective finger on what that comfortable zone is, but that's not surprising because the amount of railroading that people tolerate differs from person to person. But I'm arguing that it is not...

Only because you are still seeing railroading as a qualitative term rather than a quantitative thing. The question isn't "Are we railroading or not?" but "How much are we railroading?" Railroading is like temperature. It has a nice zone you want to be in for comfort.

I'm not changing my claim at all. I'm trying to get to my end destination in a series of steps where I think the final destination is too big to get people there all at once. So I'm having some degree of pushback to the idea that time skips even can be railroading. I'm trying to get people to...

So my argument depends on the idea that even the most conscientious GM isn't going to be always alert to their bias or alert to their own metagaming because perfect ability to be unbiased in your judgment just isn't a human thing. You can't always be fair which is why we defer decisions to a...

Well, not entirely. I am personally not a fan of illusionism, because it's fragile. If the way you tell an RPG narrative depends on the players being tricked, then it's very likely at some point they will become disillusioned in both senses of the word and then they won't have a good time...

I don't think you do. I think you react to it on an emotional level differently than some here. You aren't feeling insulted or feeling insecurity about the idea that you might railroad your players. That is to say, you are at peace with the idea that as a practical matter you can't run a game...

Quite often as a GM "the plot" as it were depends on the players getting to certain destinations. It's very much in the interest of "the plot" and the GM (if he has in mind what he wants to have happen next) to convey players to some destination with as few side treks and diversions as...

Ok, I see what's going on here. I kept getting confused as to why you'd repeatedly contridict yourself in the space of two or three sentences, but you've clarified that mysterious "why" to me. Have fun with your gaming.

No, not necessarily. But if the adventure revolves around the party's exploration of the catacombs and you guide the party to hurry up and get their behinds Monomonomp then you have railroaded them. And maybe they understand "this is the adventure so I might as well go along with it" and they...

How does that follow? Do you still end up going to Monomonomp? You seem to have narrowly defined railroading to explicitly and openly declaring, "No." In other words, you think railroading is only railroading if it's done badly. If the DM has no clevernessness and no maturity and no...

If you want to be hard and fast about that claim, that is, it's not a railroad if the players consent to ride the rails, then we are at a point where we no longer have anything to argue about. I did address this explicitly earlier, in that I said I contended that it was still a railroad if the...

I don't claim that in the general case the players choosing something is a loss of agency. I do claim that time skips (or hand waves generally) are a technique for railroading. The idea behind a time skip is (ideally) that everyone at the table agrees that they want to move past the "scenary"...

Your argument seems to be that because something is necessary or even desirable it can't possibly simultaneously result in a loss of player agency or an increase in the ability of the GM to steer the adventure toward his preferred results.

Yes, I would argue that we aren't even yet to what I would consider the magazine's Golden Age.

Back in the early Pottermore days I took the official online house sorting. I came out as Slytherin, Hyena Patronus, and 14" redwood wand (quite stiff). I think that's reasonably fair, although my political sympathies tend to lie more toward Hufflepuff in Hogwart politics, there is a certain...

So, I don't know if I have high enough WIS to accurately judge my alignment. My intention is to be NG. However, at various times I wonder whether I am LG, CG, N, or worse.